Ancient Laos legends tell of the giants who drank water from these enormous mysterious "cups". Similar sites were also found in Thailand and in North India. Their locations are strung along a straight line, which suggests that they were built on some kind of a trade route.

Chris Mitchell from Travel Happy sent us his travelogue about this ancient site:

The Plain Of Jars is probably South East Asia’s most enigmatic tourist attraction. Situated in the remote north east of Laos, the mountainous communist country which has only been open to tourists for just over a decade, are hundreds of huge stone jars scattered across several square miles.

While most ancient Asian sites, such as the Angkor temples in Cambodia, have revealed many of their secrets, historians are still completely baffled as to where the jars came from, how old they are and what they signify. They are, in short, jars of a deeply spooky nature.

There are three key sites to see the Jars, three places where they are clustered together en masse, but there are apparently over 400 locations where they are to be found scattered across the plain.

Gathered together at the top of this hill, there were around 130 of them scattered about beneath the trees, mercifully undeveloped by any tourist organization. Undisturbed amongst the vast wheat yellow and sky blue horizon of the countryside, the jars did indeed seem mysterious, but there was also a sense of serenity too.

They were all at least a couple of metres long, and must have weighed several tonnes each, some upright, some leaning after being embedded in the ground, some completely toppled over:

All of them are virtually black, and their tall, narrow, hefty bodies make them look like crude cannons, pointing in every direction as if fearing attack from all sides. The darkness of the jars’ stone also makes them seem distinctly funereal and a little sinister:

Whatever its ancient history, the Plain Of Jars has had a turbulent recent past. Thanks to its proximity to the North Vietnamese border, this area of Laos became of key significance during the Vietnam War and so was carpet bombed by the Americans. Laos holds the dubious record of being the most bombed country in the world, despite never officially being involved in the Vietnam war at all. The legacy of the war is still being felt, with farmers and their families regularly being killed or injured by the unexploded ordnance which still litters the Plain. The Jars have been fully cleared of all unexploded bombs, but not straying from the designated paths remains imperative.

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(image credit: Gilmar Nascimento / AP)

The site consists of 127 blocks, some as high as 9 feet (2.75 meters) tall. The stones placed at "regular intervals around the hill, like a crown 100 feet (30 meters) in diameter."

Scientists believe the site near the village of Calcoene, just north of the equator in Amapa state in far northern Brazil, could have been built by the ancestors of the Palikur Indians, and could be as old as 2,000 years.

(image courtesy Academy For Future Science, Brazil)

The article is co-written by Chris Mitchell, Travel Happy and A. Abrams, Dark Roasted BlendAll images are by permission of respective owners

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17 Comments:

The logical answer would be linked the earlier note about them possibly being on a trade route, they were probably used to collect rainwater so it would help travelers or some sort of message courier with water so they didn't have to run off path as much trying to find water.

the rainwater thing doesn't really fit, otherwise there wouldn't be any lidsalso, they would probably be more evenly spaced rather than clustered about.I addition, there used to be lots of smaller ones but the ones that were small enough to be moved have mostly been stolen.There's a fantastic story about how they were used to make sake and covered with the skins of fallen enemies, but the guides keep telling you they really don't know, although their best guess is that they were tombs, either for actual bodies or for ashes

I agree with the genius who said they're little tombs for ashes or whatever body parts would fit in them.My uneducated guess is that they were made after a battle. My Buddhist friend from Thailand said that most people are buried in tombs if they can afford it.